


a side story

by samarqand



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: M/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:15:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26381737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samarqand/pseuds/samarqand
Summary: "The point is that Maglor takes in the twins because Maedhros had been too foolish in that moment to counter his brother with any tenacity. Maglor had seemed cast in a beautiful resolve; amid the wreckage they had wrought, his brother looked almost like he could love being shackled to this bruised and muted life lived with Maedhros."Two unreliable narrators in purgatory narrate how they come to find, and then leave, Elrond and Elros.
Relationships: Maedhros | Maitimo/Maglor | Makalaurë
Comments: 17
Kudos: 43





	a side story

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nznk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nznk/gifts).



> For Bunia; thank you for sharing your unfailing encouragement, time, and profound intellect; thank you for filling my head with the most wonderful images.
> 
> Nota bene: I settled on the kidnap dads living with Elrond&Elros "somewhere coastal" instead of other usual contenders like Amon Ereb, given that the official word on where Maedhros&Maglor lived (or wandered) with the kids is... that there is no official word.  
> Do let me know if there are any other canon discrepancies.

Here is a side story. It is only a piece of a larger story. 

Maybe the prologue is Fëanor.

Maedhros narrates his Father reverently, lest he curse him. _Father, who delivered me away from the Light and bequeathed suffering to me._ Father who would see them martyrs for his machinations; Father writhing in his sacred flame.

With each map smoothed open, plans laid and discarded, and each morning Maglor plaits his hair, Father’s ghost rattles in their periphery.

If there is no rest for Father, there is no rest in the land while Father waits. Maedhros sits up while Maglor sleeps, and then they switch; this becomes muscle memory for them, a ritual.

In time, Maedhros reassures his Father. Thy will be done in time.

They dare not utter a word against their Father. They lie silently in the mud and ash he has stirred up for them.

 _Father, my antecedent, who sought to protect me from the pain of sin by damning me himself._ He prays to Father instead, whenever he kneels to wipe the blood from his blade on the robes of the innocent dead. _Please, please let me stand._

+

Here is a side story.

Maybe the story begins with Maglor.

The details aren’t important; the point is that Maglor takes in the twins because Maedhros had been too foolish in that moment, half-gone with the heat of destruction, to counter his brother with any tenacity. Maglor had seemed cast in a beautiful resolve; amid the wreckage they had wrought, his brother looked almost like he could love being shackled to this bruised and muted life lived with Maedhros.

The details do not matter, but they prey on Maedhros sometimes, sharp as sight and as incisive, when the unholy silence of night besets him with thinking.

Maglor with his eyes drifting away from him, nomadic as the lives they have begun living. Maglor with intimate frustration reserved for him, saying to him the night before they lay siege upon the Havens, “I cannot be all things to you.”

They are deep in debate: how to neatly collect Elwing’s Silmaril. Debate hones into something private and razor-edged. 

Maedhros retorts, his injury shamefully apparent on his face, “So you would instead be nothing to me, Káno? You would turn away -- “

“I would be your brother.” Maglor cradling their tattered map in his arms, Maglor glancing toward their restless forces and further on to Amrod and Amras. “I would be myself. Do you want that?” Maglor tossing aside his black hair, nearly undone after a long day; it was Maedhros who would plait his hair every morning for him, before. “Or would you have me fall silent that you may speak for me -- remake me into what you would prefer?”

And so when Maglor looked, with the tearful twins in his arms, almost like he could learn to love being shackled to this bruised and muted life lived with Maedhros, Maedhros became a fool, pondering if he could not just give this to Maglor to keep him feeling this way.

Nothing else is coming to them, after all.

+

Their story could be about purgatory and the time it grants them to live with themselves.

They share a bed somewhere in the craggy coastal woodlands. They don’t sleep so easily now. Ritual: one sits up, watchful, while the other lies down.

Sometimes, sprawled out drunk with exhaustion on the bed, Maedhros sees a featureless apparition in their doorway. 

It could be Father; it could be Fingon; it could be one of Dior’s missing, skeletal children; it could be any of his dead brothers; could be one of his torturers from Angband. The figure waits on him.

“I am still bleeding,” he reassures it, moving only his lips.

The figure drifts out of view, gratified. 

Maedhros rolls over to where Maglor sits with a book, presses his face into his lap.

+

And after the Havens languish a bloodied dystopia, and before help can arrive, Maglor has stolen away Elrond and Elros.

The details of this story, they both color their own shades. Some parts are true enough; some are fabrications. Maglor paints himself pristine. Maedhros constructs grim absolutes.

“You are safe now,” Maglor coos as he kneels with the crying children, caressing the tears from their eyes.

 _You are safe from us now_ , Maedhros wants to say, because that is the point. “We will not hurt you,” he says instead from his position atop a gore-splattered dais, because it is kinder to say.

The twins cry so much water they could fill a sea. Maglor and Maedhros compose them a cozy bedroom once they whisk them back to their makeshift home south of the Havens. 

Maglor seeks to habituate them to his and Maedhros’ life, seeks their approval.

“Your captives,” Maedhros calls them. That is how he narrates the story. Stalwart, stoic.

“Our charges,” Maglor contends, revising the story to read redemptive.

“How pristine you are, Káno,” Maedhros mutters. Maglor glares at him, and they inhabit their cold mausoleum of silence before Maedhros eases the ugliness with his hand on Maglor’s shoulder. Maglor hums a wordless song to sweep away the effluvia of their decaying prospects.

Behind their door, Elrond and Elros whisper to each other. They huddle together; they freeze and lour at Maglor when he gently enters with a plate of sliced pears and water for them.

When he leaves and shuts the door with a comforting click behind him, Maedhros and Maglor listen to them throw the plate to the floor with a muffled clunk. Elros says with gravity to Elrond, “They’re fattening us up so they can eat us.”

In the face of Maglor’s dismay at hearing this, Maedhros snorts a laugh.

Once upon a time, long ago, while he wrestled with pain and abandonment with nowhere to put it but on his dearest brother, he told Maglor of a stretch of time spent so famished upon Thangorodrim, bound and exposed but for his own filth covering him, that he came to relish the skittering touch of cockroaches. Soon after, he came to relish their greasy flavor when he learned to snap at them and gnash his teeth through the white viscous fluid and spiny legs that caught and squeaked in his gums. It was better, after all, than what he was made to eat while confined in Angband. It was much more to his liking than the flesh of other Elves, the wastewater, the rats who put up a fight even half-swallowed.

The moral of the story, he told Maglor, was this: you can get used to anything. But once you are so well used to it, it becomes impossible to wipe clean from the fëa. And that is why, so long since those bygone hurts, Maedhros has never regained his old appetite. 

He had aimed to see revulsion cross his brother’s comely face as it shone down upon him and his untouched dinner; he had aimed to be reviled by Maglor for such self-debasement; aimed to watch Maglor, staid and winsome second-born, drift away from him and prove his loneliness right.

Maglor had inclined himself over the chair’s imposition between them and wound his arms around Maedhros’ chest, chin resting upon the crown of his head. His long black hair had tumbled over Maedhros’ face to veil his sight. 

Maglor had stifled his tears hastily as they arrived, but there they were wetting Maedhros’ scalp; Maedhros was possessed at once with jealousy and tenderness for how gracious his brother’s sorrow was, manifesting to be shared with someone who could find none left in him.

“Come with me, Nelyo,” Maglor had said, stroking at Maedhros’ pitted cheekbone with undue devotion.

They had gone on a meandering walk. Maglor had lured him into a weary serenity with ad hoc poetry about the fireflies adrift in the leaves. Or had he merely been fatigued with his own determination -- was the relieved rattle in his bones their acceptance of the futility of this story?

But the details are marginal; the crux of this story is that they returned to the cold bastion of Himring and Maedhros ate his dinner.

That night, like a compulsion he wanted to be close to Maglor. He wanted more poetry, more of those harper’s fingers easing his aching skin.

He wanted to be cruel and make his brother cry again, because he couldn’t cry for himself.

He doesn’t tell himself that story anymore.

+

Maybe this is how the story begins: nomadic. 

Even now, crouching in wait in the fastness of the trees or ensconced in their drafty, dim lodgings, they are planning their next step further away from the fading light. They swift toward the strange chasm that Father called their destiny. 

Maglor drags his feet at times, as though there is somewhere else he could be; he hesitates -- sometimes sullen, sometimes saintly with his hand glancing along Maedhros’ latticework of scars and fall of hair. 

Sometimes he looks at Maedhros like he would coax him somewhere he knows where there is yet some saving grace for them, somewhere where there is something fantastic: a staircase just waiting for them, so they can climb out of the murk they inhabit now.

Sometimes Maedhros wants to reach for him, and maybe Maglor knows this, but no one is speaking a word of it.

+

It takes time for the sons of Elwing to bear being in the same room with the sons of Fëanor.

Maglor is inexplicably consumed with the notion that he would see his hostages happy: on his harp, he plucks sweet, slow melodies, or composes sea shanties in homage to their brief coastal habitat until Elrond, inquisitive, mimics the deft dance of his fingers along the strings. 

On the nights the boys are inconsolable with the memory of their parents and cry their sea of tears and words hang dead, Maglor lies near them, spreads a picture book open before him, and rhythmically turns the pages until the boys wipe their noses and sniffle down beside him to look at the book’s illumed illustrations.

Play pretend.

Maglor’s gaze flickers to Maedhros in these uncharted moments. He conjures up stories upon each page; his dark eyes find Maedhros while he painstakingly bewitches those sad little creatures to listen closely, list closer to him.

Here in this deep indigo mountain, you may find a clan of enchanted bears; under the labyrinth of tree and vine, they like to stand up, link their arms, and dance big circles around their crackling campfire after a particularly good meal (and Maglor slyly plies them again with another plate of fruit; dried apricots).

On the next page, the fish in this sparkling pond decide they want a change of scenery, so they poke their heads out of the water and speak a secret word in Cloud Language, and the clouds let down their rain, and it keeps raining till the pond fills to overflowing, till the pond becomes a lake, and then the lake becomes the sea.

 _Why do you walk yourself into hurt this way_ , Maedhros wants to ask. 

_Why do you look at me as though you expect me to make you hurt._

The kinder thing is to remain quiet.

He doesn’t invite the images ready in his head, clear as the detail in Maglor’s beautiful book: Fingon’s face burnt and caved in -- pulverized to nothing under knotted hair; standards torn asunder and fluttering around his broken body like a flock of smashed birds.

The emptiness of the landscape when abruptly as a gasp, their brothers blinked out of view one by one, neat and complete; and they never returned to repeople the scene again, and the scene was not even haunted by their memory. And it was Maedhros' fault, because Maedhros needed to move on, he and his only brother needed to keep moving; Maedhros had to stop telling himself their story.

And here, sing-songs Maglor, from these trees in this glistening glade shall drop a different fruit for every time you reach for one. Hold open your hands and see what falls into them. 

Elrond and Elros open their hands. Maglor drops apricots into their palms. 

And then he tosses an apricot to Maedhros. Maedhros catches it and moves into their chambers from the aperture. The little boys lift their heads and consider him with their tear-reddened eyes.

On this page, “The hollows of these sea cliffs right here,” Maedhros points out, as though he recognizes the image as an old friend, “house mysterious winged children who will grant you any wish, should you be quick enough to catch one of them.”

At last, Elrond and Elros throw their caution to the wind and pitch over the book to study the illustrations and find the stories within. 

That night, instead of sitting up, Maglor lies down next to Maedhros and curls himself around Maedhros’ maimed body. He sighs into his back. 

When this feeling was everywhere always, when love was generous as fountains and the Light exalted him and his brothers, this feeling didn’t beg a name. But it begs to be named now, the way tension knots his stomach and his hand compulsively reaches to claw and grasp for Maglor’s, asking to be held.

Everything lurches and sinks in purgatory, save for Maglor’s breathing. It is constant because Maglor is the last thing constant.

+

This is true:

The house is haunted.

The noise of footsteps and crackle of a hideous, unseen heat in the chill autumn keep Maedhros keen-eyed. When it’s his turn to rest, he asks Maglor, “How could anyone sleep?”

Maglor plays his harp for him in these moments, softly to keep Elrond and Elros ignorant of their insomnia. Sometimes the lullabies work and he falls into an uneasy reverie, dully gazing out the window to the starless nights.

Tonight Maedhros murmurs, “Wintry now.”

“Is it?” Maglor asks, his fingers stilling on the strings. He looks out the window owlishly, interrupted from the safety he had methodically composed through song, disoriented to be returned to this threshold where more anguish approaches. He reaches to close the creaking wooden shutters and blot out the stars.

“We have tarried more than a season overlong here,” he assesses with a dispassionate squint around the dark of their chamber: splintered trim and rickety furniture, seaside dwelling. It bears the same character as the ravaged Havens do now: devoid. 

Maglor straightens up where he sits, his fingers falling away from their positions.

When is the right time to pick up and move? It will never be the right time because there is nowhere right to go; it is always the right time. Father’s expectation sears them.

Maglor’s voice drops to a whisper, hush of the dead, which is how Maedhros knows to anticipate another impassioned debate. “Elrond and Elros have only just begun to settle -- “

“Then leave them safe here,” Maedhros whispers to the silhouette of the harp and its tense harper. “Leave them to be found.”

“You would have me abandon them now,” Maglor returns, affronted.

“Under cover of care for these children who never needed your salvation, you would forsake your Oath when the hour to press onward draws nigh?”

“This is no cover,” Maglor hisses. “I would give them a gentle place to land amid their strife, so long as it is in my power. The Oath does not preclude kindness.”

“Yes, so pristine you are, Káno,” Maedhros mutters to the muted walls, scathing.

“I never _said_ \-- “

“Yet it was not your saintly altruism gripping you to snatch them. You sought to wipe clean your bloody story -- ”

Maglor rises silently and leaves the room. A moment later, the door to the outside creaks shut. Maglor departs the farce of a home he has painstakingly constructed.

So much the better. It’s all straw and twine swaying in purgatory’s gales.

How easily lost to the wind.

How eagerly Maglor abandons Maedhros.

Maedhros sits up, wrung and brittle as wreckage, and watches the aether of night for a sign. 

+

The details are unimportant. But they bedevil the back of the mind, ready for remembrance.

Some sleepless time later, when the black steeping the land dries up into a pallid grey, Maglor returns. 

He has nowhere else to go, after all.

Maedhros has kept himself moving. He has stoked a fire; he prepares water for the children to wash. All the things the living do.

The water heats to a turbulent boil. Maedhros ignores it because Maglor has come back for him; Maglor, the only one left in his life, who looks both uneasy and relieved to see him. 

As though chasing a long-sought reunion, he caresses Maedhros’ face, agonizingly sweet, and kisses Maedhros on his forehead, on a scar scissioning down his jaw, then his lips. 

Maglor has no one else, after all.

Maedhros puts his arm around him and they sit together at the fire, still as the dead, while the earth resurrects around them.

+

What is certain is that children are resilient: the children eventually acclimate to them, this borderland they inhabit. They begin to smile up at their keepers, seeking a sun to bend toward. 

“We will do it like this,” Maedhros says. “Watch closely first.” 

Cleanly he cleaves the wood with his axe, one-handed, feet planted. Elrond and Elros look on; they read impressed, curious, and squabble for the light maul he offers to them for practice over his cumbersome axe. He situates the pliable silver fir wood on the slab and gives an encouraging nod to Elrond. “Aim for the edges, and aim for the cracks you see,” he directs them, finger at the fractures down the grain. “Look, the wood is ready to split here.”

Elrond squeezes his eyes shut when he swings a wavering arc down, missing the piece entirely. Maedhros smiles and places a hand on his shoulder. “Your form is right. Next time, certainly.” 

Father would have bristled if he had ever seen Maedhros fumble so. 

Maedhros loves Father.

Maedhros permits himself to revel in the meager defiance of Father’s way.

Elros ably splits the wood on his first try and glows a grin up to him.

“Well done, you,” Maedhros grins back. 

Elrond gets a feel for it -- succeeds. His exhilaration whisks smoke-white in the crisp air.

“Excellent, Elrond. Excellent.”

Maglor skins and debones fish on a wobbling, three-legged table nearby, a gorey business he manages to keep tidy. His hair is tied up as he ardently works, worthless for veiling the smile that alights on his face as he listens.

Maglor teaches the boys the seasonality of fruits and vegetables as they make a stew together.

At the table, Maedhros demonstrates with his dusty hand how to eat stew politely: drawing the spoon from the front of the bowl to the back, sipping from the side of the spoon. 

When they tire of propriety, they all shrug at each other, lift the bowls, and drink together.

What is certain is that autumn creaks to deep winter in the murky inbetween, and that Maedhros has capitulated to Maglor’s ask that play-pretend before the end lasts just a breath longer.

Father’s Oath makes him itch. It decays his dreams and stitches him up with troubled thoughts. Their lodgings teem with embittered specters. Were it not for Maglor’s counsel and love he would have done something foolish by now, though he doesn’t ruminate too long on what that would be. Details. 

Details like Caranthir’s unfinished foray into poetry he worked on with Maglor’s help in the softer moments, and the way it was never spoken of again after Caranthir was struck from the story. 

Details like the way Maglor’s fingers stroke and smoothe at the harp’s overwrought strings, moving them to song under his touch. 

Details like the way Maedhros reminds his brother that here in this purgatory, they are lying in wait, not in rest, and Maglor returns, “We prepare our deathbeds all the same,” but nevertheless coaxes Maedhros down to the sea salty sheets with him. 

Details like how one night at the fire, bent over their useless maps, they draw near without a word and their lips find and linger against each oher's -- a familiar gesture, but it incites Maedhros to slant away and Maglor duck his head and they do not speak of it, a dirty secret. Details.

+

There is a story he recalls to himself, to make sure it’s still true. The last time he saw Maglor laugh. 

On the beach digging for cockles and loading them into a bucket, the surf surges in and the shorebreak knocks Elrond flat on his back. Maglor rushes to him, takes his hands and swings the soggy child back onto his feet. Elrond whoops wildly, beaming. 

Elros pretends to stumble and fall with the next swell of shorebreak; Maglor, smiling then, grabs his little hands and swings him back upright. 

Elrond yells over the inhale of the coming waters, “Now you!”

“Me!” exclaims Maglor. He pauses, then lies himself down with a beautiful sort of abandon onto the wet sand and rocks. 

“Save him! Save him!” scream Elrond and Elros at each other while they each grab one of his hands and pull in futility, trying to drag him away from the next crush of waves. “Save him! Help!”

Maglor helps along their help with a subtle push of his feet on the sand, but it’s not much salvation until Elros screams something frantic at Maedhros, who swoops in to grab at Maglor’s wrist and help deliver him toward dry land. And they do; they save him from the little waves. The children cheer and dance in the water lapping at their ankles. 

Maglor embraces them both in gratitude, laughing loud and musical and free. “You saved me!” 

And the twins are delighted because Maglor is delighted, they clutch him as though he were a seawall against the surf and he is, because he gathers them up in his arms, lifting them far away from the tide --

Maedhros doesn’t know what to do with it. He is smiling. He doesn’t know when he began smiling.

And then Maglor’s smile shines on Maedhros, the last one left to him in this life. He is looking right at him through his windblown black hair sprinkled with white, starry sand, and smiling like they have finally clawed their way out of the primordial and horrific under-ground and the light of the world is brilliant upon them.

+

“I cannot be all things to you,” Maglor tells him in queasy dreams.

He wakes up to the figure in the doorway.

“I am still bleeding,” he promises.

Climb up or climb down. The story ends the same. They will lose because they cannot _not_ win.

Maedhros knows this. He just doesn’t tell himself that story right now.

+

“I cannot be all things to you,” Maglor tells him as the pomegranates in his arms stain him.

Inside, Elrond and Elros, soft-hearted boys who receive Maglor’s loving care and return it tenfold after these years spent together, pore over his books in their diligent studies.

Outside, Maedhros returns from a rally point with their dwindled forces; he brims with news of a war burgeoning against Morgoth. Their grave task may soon enough find footing on the slippery ground again, so long as they may meet the moment ably -- uninhibited. 

Maedhros glances toward the house.

With unease shading his demeanor, Maglor tilts his head away; his gaze stabs against the earth as though to condemn it. He is a fool.

“You would be my detractor,” Maedhros declaims, “and only that.”

“I cannot be all things to you,” he says.

And it hurts, but that’s not the point.

“Now, when I call upon you to stand by my side -- ”

“I am by your side,” Maglor retorts. “There is no one more beloved to me than you, Nelyo. No other I would wish to walk this dark path beside.”

“Pretty sounds,” Maedhros says, cold. “But I would ask for your mettle now. They cannot follow and you know this.”

“My mettle?” Maglor nearly laughs, his eyes bright with anger. The pomegranates’ garnet juice discolors his sleeves and blushes upon the heel of his hands. “Here I stand before you, anointed in the carnage of all our mindless slaughterings, and you ask what of my mettle. Shall I debase myself in the blood of some lonely traveler to pass muster for you? Do I truly still gleam pristine in your eyes? You must be blind, questioning my mettle.”

Maedhros, stricken, shakes his head. “You are twisting my words,” he says. “Only Caranthir told us -- “

“I am not Moryo,” Maglor interrupts. He swallows and hefts the ungainly pomegranates, his eyes flickering to the clouds above. His voice goes tight. “I am not Father; I am not -- I am not Finno; I am not Curvo or Tyelko; nor our dear Pityo, Telvo...”

He pauses, sweeps in a deep, grieving breath as though he would slip into a lament. But then he only says: “No. I cannot be all things to you.”

“You are,” Maedhros says, his voice even, his pulse deafening.

“I cannot be,” Maglor insists. “Nelyo, I cannot.”

“You are the only thing to me,” Maedhros says. It feels good to say it. It feels frightening to say it, when they have been swept so far out into this dim denouement. It feels good to say it. “You are the only thing.”

Maglor’s eyes search for a way out. There is nothing left. No rope, no root. They are helpless to the catastrophe of their conjuring.

So he returns his hunted gaze to Maedhros because he has nowhere else to go. “But you do not want me.”

And then he glances down, black curls obscuring his expression, and starts when he finds his hands slicked red. He thinks, for a tense second, he could be seeing something other than pomegranate juice. 

And he knows then he cannot protect Elrond and Elros. Not while Father’s words lash like a tongue of fire. And the fire is on their tongues, too, the ashen taste of their own damning words uttered. Maglor and Maedhros know this.

All else is details.

Details being that Maglor blinks slowly down to the languid leak of pomegranate juice and then finally capitulates to Maedhros, as he is wont to do: he broaches the topic of an eventual parting, for the good of Elrond and Elros, to the boys while they make pine needle tea.

Details being that Maglor seems heartened by how quickly these capable young boys warm to the idea, their faces shining with resolve as they bandy about ideas for their future. 

Details being that Maglor’s smiling encouragement wanes to quiet attention when he recognizes a measure of relief on the twins’ faces, too.

Maedhros carries the conversation and watches his brother’s stained hands fold in his lap. 

Details. Maglor licking the pomegranate juice from his fingers, his gaze remote as though he is spellbound by their disastrous ending’s approach; he then returns to the present to watch his brother watching him. 

Maglor, the only one left in the twilight hours who wants to know Maedhros’ wants. 

Maglor washing his hands, his clothing, and finding red still darkens his very seams.

+

Father in his restless writhing directs them to move, so they move. They prepare Elrond and Elros with word and deed. They do right by them. Their time together careens toward its conclusion while they speak kind reassurances and make no promises to find each other again. 

Elrond, sweet Elrond seeking comfort when confronted by unknowns, begins weighing if he ought to simply remain with Maglor, as he has much yet to learn of lore and the arts from Fëanor’s second-born. Elros aspires to engage valiantly in the war that rumbles and clamors into fruition, and he spars with anyone who will suffer his zeal.

No, Maedhros and Maglor emphatically forbid both of them.

One night in the late summer, or is it a clement autumn -- a balmy night cheered by rains, they leave the house and the twins for good. They leave without a word of farewell just as the twins fall into the unperturbed sleep of innocents. 

Better to keep them unblighted by knowledge of their captors’ final, fatalistic undertakings. Better to take shelter elsewhere, bequeathing the boys candied fruit, meticulously mended clothing, tea leaves, Maglor’s books, and the close proximity to the beach with its fishers and combers who may have once heard rumor of the missing twins of Sirion.

In their haste to abandon the children, they only shoulder careworn robes and weaponry, Maglor his small harp. Maedhros tucks one of Maglor’s small poetry collections into his cloak. All the rest is left for the twins’ appreciation or anger.

Ascetic, all forsaken but each other, they fly into the night without a parting glance to climb the highs and lows of the vulnerable landscape, seeking a Fëanorian outpost some hours down the coast. They crawl along the wet spattered earth along the ravines and root-ridged hills. They skulk, they crouch like fell beasts wrought in the shadows. They stalk about the perimeter of scattered homesteads; they fall against the ground and melt into the endless, damp night.

After hours spent in flight across the hinterlands, closing in on their outpost, they encounter a confused and frantic gaggle of orcs who have lost their way; the grimacing, growling band quail at the sight of Maedhros. They know his face. They’re right to fear him.

Handily, he and his brother murder. They trample and gut them; they disembowel. Then they keep running toward their next chapter.

Maglor’s hands scrabble against the soil. Maedhros’ boots squeal for purchase.

They are free, finally, of the haunting house and of the last soft moral fibers to cling at them.

A feral grin crescents across Maedhros’ face as they continue their mad sprint. _Thy will be done. Father, thy will is nearly done._ It won’t be long before the end. “Witness us,” he whispers. “Witness us.”

They duck low and slink into a fen, ankle-deep in dirty sluice. Frogs silence to behold them. Maglor’s panting behind him goes erratic. Still he keeps up, unwilling to be apart from Maedhros. 

The muck swallows at their feet; Maedhros halts to peer into the sticky night and Maglor, who has been running with his eyes furtively flying everywhere but forward, slams into Maedhros’ back. Then, churlish despair, he shoves at Maedhros with hands that love the strings they pluck, love the prosody they scrawl, that hurt Maedhros.

Maedhros shoves him back and Maglor grasps at him; his hand fists in Maglor’s collar and wrenches him close. Threatening or wanting. 

Maglor, the only thing left to him, leans flush against him, pushing at his shoulder with a weakening fist. The young moon subdues the tracks of drying tears down his cheeks; he looks furious, as though someone has betrayed him. He is besmirched with mud and grit, not so pristine anymore, dirty as Maedhros has long been.

Maedhros presses his forehead against Maglor’s, daring him, watching to see if his brother will break or bend under his hand. “If you want to say something, brother, I would beseech you, say it,” Maedhros pants, gaze searing.

“We run as though to escape all our mess,” Maglor hushes, clipped with emotion. “Why? Our mess is everywhere.”

“We pursue triumph now,” Maedhros declares, “as you and I vowed, Káno, to the last. Stop dragging your feet.”

“More bloodletting as we only await sign of a Silmaril? More loss?” Maglor makes to extricate himself but his brother will not let him; Maglor pries at the iron grip in his robes. “Is this the only thing left to us to want, Nelyo? No warmth or solace where it is proffered to us -- only the stiff fingers of obsession tightening around our throats?” 

His pretty voice is breaking, glass shards. They drive into Maedhros and needle under his skin. Maglor repeats like a chorus: “Is that all you want?” 

He shakes his head, words dead, _We must, lest our terror outlive us_ \-- unspeakable.

“Is that what you want?”

How to speak of want, when nothing is Maedhros’ anymore. Not the axe he handed off to Elrond in congratulations for perseverance; not the tyrannical spook that was once his Father, urging him to seek hurt; not his own voice gone rough with years of strife; not his own dreams, hijacked by visions of loss.

He has long given up speaking of want.

He wants to kiss Maglor and he doesn’t know what to say of it, so he simply does it -- a familiar gesture, but he feels Maglor go pliant against him, because maybe all Maglor wants is the love of the only one left to love.

Words begin on his brother’s lips, a lament, _Would that the earth would consume us, leaving no trace,_ so Maedhros kisses him again and feels his hands, trembling as though within the ringing final note of song, twine into his hair and his cloak.

There is nothing to say. Maedhros gives up seeking the words to speak it.

The ink-dark assembles its world through a series of sensations. A wading step forward through the mire, the way his brother’s poet mouth moves to complicate, and he does -- brief, elemental taste of sea salt on his lips that yields to the tentative slip of their tongues, and the way they almost stop there, but then they don’t, and Maglor almost, almost asks against his mouth, _What is this_ , but he doesn’t, because maybe he knows, maybe he knows better than Maedhros does.

The clink of their teeth, insistent. The way their hands twist in each other’s clothing, imploring the fleeting sin to stay.

But it does -- only so Maedhros can take his hand, suggest Maglor along until both their feet glide adeptly over the stones and whispering tall grasses, for the swift remainder of the journey to the outpost.

They stay close, shoulders brushing, fingers lacing together. The silence drifts like a fog between them. Tension keeps Maglor’s eyes on Maedhros, as though he could risk losing him now.

They have, after all, lost everything else. 

+

Maybe this happens, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s a restless waking dream Maedhros has, caught in the reeling toward the end of their story. Maybe he is heady with fatalism in the small hours before the morning gloom. 

In the liminal space between the daze of their escape to the barren outpost, and waking up on the floor to try again at constructing a plan befitting Father, they could contrive any narrative, but -- 

no one narrates what happened, after it happens.

Hardly a foot in the door, Maedhros pushes his brother up against the deadened hide of the wall and kisses him again -- deep, hard. Maglor’s hands fling out behind him to protect the harp on his back: a smack against the wall, palms flatten. A sigh, unbidden, out of Maedhros as their tongues slip together again.

This house, once warm, has been abandoned beside their forces’ faith in the righteousness of the Oath. Many now vanished. You could wait and wait on them to answer the call but --

no one and nothing arrives for them in this dark room.

All the warmth left to him is Maglor, pressing his body up against him as though to compel him, and he does: they both handle each other to the floor, dust motes fluttering upon their impact to make room, and Maglor is then sitting astride him and inclining over him, tangled hair slipping around them to curtain the empty world away.

A noise drawn out of Maglor as they rut against each other. Panting. Scrape of mud-caked boots against the floors, theirs both, a rudimentary expression of desire. Leaves and burrs wedded into Maglor’s hair scratching against his palm when he fists his hand in it and directs him with just a tug, makes him keep there just like this, like it’s a visceral need.

Hefting himself up to an elbow, Maedhros works his fingers at his sword belt and wrests aside cloak, mail, tunic, underclothes, leggings -- strokes himself, tips his head away from the lips that seek his, that seek him, just to watch Maglor mirror him, undoing his own belt buckles and ties and pulling at filthy clothing and then his hand moves, moves against his length. And with his other hand he grasps at Maedhros -- to kiss him again, like he can’t get enough of it --

And no one keeps track of the narrative. Maedhros does not remember having moved his hips or his dirty and craving hand. He doesn’t remember when his pulse deafened him, destroyed all but the sensation of slick, unceremonious pleasure.

Their knuckles scraping and catching against the other’s as they stroke in an uneven tempo, careless and frenetic. The architecture of his brother’s bones, the thrill of his weight upon him. The fine bridge of nose and dark lashes and smooth brow of a sinner, just like him, nudging against him to earn another kiss, and another, to not stop kissing him so that he knows.

His knees against the whining wood floor are definite. His thighs tight around him, incontestable.

The way he pins Maedhros because Maedhros lets him. The sound he makes like it’s all he wants when Maedhros presses lips and teeth possessively against his neck and leaves a mark, red like a stain -- 

Maedhros wakes up thinking about it, so vivid and heated he could touch himself again, he could abhor himself for fixating on it, because it didn’t happen, or did it --

The way he maybe falters and forgets himself, wracked. The way Maglor sways on him, breathless, like they are falling and falling and falling to a place to where no one climbs out again.

+

No provisions in the ransacked outpost. 

Maglor draws water from a well. He returns with a bucket and a bundle of pine needles for tea and Maedhros smiles a little as he procures the volume of poetry from his pocket and offers it to Maglor.

“You had not finished reading it,” he supplies.

Maglor rests the bucket of water on the filthy table and takes the book. He glances up to Maedhros, down to the book. He flips through the book and smiles his luminous smile, and then hides his sorrow as he embraces Maedhros. The book modestly imposes between them. Maedhros thinks his brother murmurs gratitude against his shoulder, but his voice is too faint with grief to be known.

+

Father a whisp of smoke, primeval.

They play pretend on the derelict floor near the hearth, prod at the weakening fire. They bundle themselves together in thin blankets on the floor as their tea goes cold. 

Maglor bows his head over his stained hands, wondering aloud the names of those who have perished under them; then he leans against Maedhros and picks a twig from Maedhros’ hair -- combs his fingers through to absolve him of the day’s sins.

Night spent in wait: Maglor sits up, Maedhros lies down.

Maglor opens the poetry book and begins reading aloud in that mellifluous voice, a long prose poem. His fingers never stop threading through Maedhros’ russet hair. And the poem tells of a swan in a fen, and of a prince from far away, disavowed and wandering, asking for the swan’s counsel, and the swan transforms into a wise woman who holds all the answers, and so she --

In the yawning maw of the doorway, Maedhros hears a deliberate step upon the creaking floorboards, sees the apparition. 

How fast it has arrived for him. There is no escaping it.

Maedhros raises his head, a leg kicking away the blankets as though he would leap to his feet. But he only watches the featureless silhouette, the charred thing. He cannot stand, he cannot find his footing. He only watches.

 _Bleed me_ , Maedhros begs silently. _You have me now. Tarry no longer. Just bleed me._

(“Nelyo,” Maglor says at glimpsing his fierce gaze, tone dulcet to shroud his concern. He lowers his book.)

But nothing, no one comes to him.

The apparition only drifts. Blank and blackened, its shoulders hunching under the weight of the Age’s wickedness, its hands -- 

it is one-handed.

Maedhros sits up. 

“Nelyo,” Maglor entreats. Hand on his arm.

(Just a little longer and you’ll be out. You’ll both be out.

But Maedhros cannot tell himself that story yet.)

Maedhros looks to his brother and touches at his book, and warily Maglor raises the book again; Maedhros eases back into the nest of blankets, rolls over to press his face into Maglor’s lap. He closes his eyes. 

“Then what happens?” he asks.


End file.
